Brothers' likely plan was more attacks

Monday

Apr 22, 2013 at 12:01 AMApr 22, 2013 at 12:58 PM

WASHINGTON - The two men suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing were armed with a small arsenal of guns, ammunition and explosives when they first confronted police early on Friday, and most likely were planning more attacks, the authorities said yesterday.

WASHINGTON - The two men suspected in the Boston Marathon bombing were armed with a small arsenal of guns, ammunition and explosives when they first confronted police early on Friday, and most likely were planning more attacks, the authorities said yesterday.

U.S. officials said they were increasingly certain that the two suspects had acted on their own, but were looking for any hints that someone had trained or inspired them. The FBI is broadening its global investigation in search of a motive and pressing the Russian government for more details about a Russian request to the FBI in 2011 about one of the suspects' possible links to extremist groups, a senior U.S. official said yesterday.

New details about the suspects, their alleged plot and the widening inquiry emerged yesterday, including the types of weapons that were used and the bomb design's link to a terrorist manual. Lawmakers also accused the FBI of an intelligence failure, questioning whether the agency had responded forcefully enough to Russia's warnings.

The surviving suspect, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, remained in a Boston hospital in serious condition. The authorities said they think he had tried to kill himself, because a gunshot wound to his neck "had the appearance of a close-range, self-inflicted style," the senior U.S. official said.

ABC and NBC news reported late yesterday that Tsarnaev had regained consciousness and was responding in writing to questions put to him by authorities.

As investigators intensified their search for clues, the investigation's focus shifted in the past two days from a manhunt that relied heavily on cutting-edge surveillance technology to help track down the suspects to more-traditional investigative methods like interviews with friends, relatives and others who knew the suspects and examinations of computers, phones, writings and their possessions.

More details of what the authorities said was the original plot were becoming clearer. Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis said the authorities think that Tsarnaev and his older brother, Tamerlan, 26, had planned more attacks beyond the bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, which killed three people and injured more than 170. When the suspects seized a Mercedes-Benz sport-utility vehicle and held the driver hostage, they told him that they planned to head to New York, the senior U.S. official said yesterday.

It was not clear whether the suspects had told the driver what they planned to do there.

Davis told CBS' Face the Nation yesterday: "We have reason to believe, based upon the evidence that was found at that scene - the explosions, the explosive ordnance that was unexploded and the firepower that they had - that they were going to attack other individuals."

One unanswered question is whether others helped plan and carry out the Boston Marathon attack last Monday, which federal officials said was still under investigation. Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said he believed the brothers were not affiliated with a larger network.

"All of the information that I have, they acted alone, these two individuals, the brothers," he said on ABC's This Week.

Some investigators said they think the suspects used a design for the pressure-cooker bombs they allegedly detonated from a manual published in the online English-language magazine of al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen. Menino said Tamerlan Tsarnaev had " brainwashed" his younger brother to follow him and "read those magazines that were published on how to create bombs, how to disrupt the general public, and things like that."

The suspects' uncle Ruslan Tsarni, who lives in Maryland, said in an interview yesterday that he had first noticed a change in the older brother in 2009. Tsarni sought advice from a family friend, who told him that Tamerlan's radicalization had begun after he met a recent convert to Islam in the Boston area. Tsarni said he had later learned from a relative that his nephew had met the convert in 2007.

As scrutiny increased on the how the brothers had been radicalized, Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, who heads the Homeland Security Committee, and Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who is also on the panel, sent a letter to the directors of three of the nation's leading intelligence agencies calling the FBI's handling of the case "an intelligence failure."

They said Tamerlan Tsarnaev was the fifth man since the Sept. 11 attack to be suspected of committing terrorism while under investigation by the bureau. Agents had questioned him in 2011 in response to a request from the Russian government, a year before he traveled to Chechnya and Dagestan, predominantly Muslim republics in the North Caucasus region of Russia. Both have been hotbeds of militant separatists.

The request from the Russian government was directed to the FBI's legal attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in January 2011, a senior U.S. official said. The Russians feared Tamerlan Tsarnaev could be a risk, and said their request was "based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country's region to join unspecified underground groups," the FBI said in a statement on Friday.

A senior U.S. official said yesterday that despite requests from U.S. officials for more details at the time, this was all the information the Russians provided.

The bureau sent two counterterrorism agents from its Boston field office to interview Tamerlan Tsarnaev and family members, a senior U.S. official said on Saturday.

According to the FBI's statement, "The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign," and conveyed those findings to "the foreign government" - which officials say was Russia - by the summer of 2011.

On CNN's State of the Union, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said: "The fact that we could not track him has to be fixed. It's people like this that you don't want to let out of your sight, and this was a mistake. I don't know if our laws are insufficient or the FBI failed, but we're at war with radical Islamists, and we need to up our game."

In the wake of the current furor, the FBI has pressed Russian authorities for more details about Moscow's original request on Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as well as any information the Russian intelligence services have developed since then, according to a senior U.S. official.

These discussions are "sensitive," the official said, because of the differences in protocol and laws between the two countries, and the Russians' reluctance to disclose confidential intelligence to foreign governments.

Tensions also escalated yesterday over how to handle the case of the surviving suspect. Republican lawmakers want President Barack Obama to declare Dzhokhar Tsarnaev an "enemy combatant" in order to question him without a lawyer and other protections of the criminal justice system.

But the administration is pushing back. Tsarnaev, a naturalized U.S. citizen, is a Muslim, but there is as yet no known evidence suggesting that he is part of al-Qaida.